Korean Voices Make Waves on Arabic Radio

As a child at home in the United States, I used to listen to broadcasts from faraway places via short wave radio, the transmission typically uneven and full of static. Today those distant voices come in clear as a bell, via streaming audio on any smartphone. Late the other night I was surfing Arabic radio stations, from Baghdad to Algiers, and by chance heard two women speaking the language impeccably — but with a peculiar accent.

“Dear listeners,” one of them said, “how did you spend your day?”

“Every new day gives us new hopes and aspirations,” said the other.

I listened awhile, and eventually heard a haunting oriental melody and a man’s voice say, “From the Korean capital Seoul, we meet again over the airwaves — coming together in love, in goodness, and in hope.”

It turned out to be the Arabic service of the South Korean government’s “Korean Broadcasting System.” Top-of-the-hour news detailed the country’s military preparations to face its saber-rattling neighbor to the north, and a visit to Europe by the Korean president. It was read by an Egyptian man, but followed by a business report from another man, again with a Korean accent. “Korean exports exceeded $50 billion for the month of October,” he said — “a new record for a country that exported only $19 million a year following its independence from Japan.” Following station identification, the Korean ladies returned and recounted the growing number of Emaratis and Egyptians who had taken proficiency exams in the Korean language. “Ma sha allah,” one said. “And so continues the advance toward the furthering of relations and friendship between Koreans and Arabs, which will increase our mutual cooperation and understanding of one another, God willing.” The show went on to cover the latest in Korean cinema and music and teach phrases in the Korean language. As the clock struck the hour, the show looped back to the beginning and repeated — just one hour of new content per day.

I grew curious: What are Koreans hoping to accomplish exactly by broadcasting to the Arab world? My curiosity happens also to be a professional pursuit: I’m a broadcaster in Arabic myself, hosting a weekly program in Arabic on Moroccan radio and appearing often on the region’s satellite TV networks. After writing a book on civil society building in Iraq and another on the Moroccan security sector, I’ve decided to write my third on Arabic media.

The following morning, I visited Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who has studied the expanding Asian footprint in North Africa and the Middle East. “South Korea sees the Arab world as an important market,” he explained, ” — for manufactured goods, for construction – and they get virtually all their oil from the Middle East.” The government has a contract to build nuclear reactors in Abu Dhabi, he went on, and a detachment of military personnel are helping train the Emirati special forces. “I think South Korea sees itself coming into the commercial role that the US has traditionally occupied, and creating some reciprocity between the South Korea thirst for oil and the South Korean ability to manufacture. But one of their challenges is that nobody has heard of Korea. I mean, people have heard of China; it has ancient relations with the Middle East. People have heard of Japan, which has very longstanding relations with a lot of countries. No word comes to mind when people think about Korea, and they’re trying to invest that idea with something.”

Apparently, this would be where the Korean Broadcasting Service in Arabic comes in. It is a tool for what Americans call public diplomacy — that is, a proactive effort to influence foreign publics in support of a country’s foreign policies. The United States invests hundreds of millions annually in its own public diplomacy outreach to the Arab world, including the nonstop broadcast Radio Sawa, airing on local FM radio across North Africa and the Middle East. Sawa competes for Arab attention with rival broadcasts from China, Russia, Iran, and every country in Western Europe, as well as transnational movements ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Catholic Church. Viewed together, such efforts amount to a multibillion-dollar industry — but whether the broadcasters are achieving their political objectives is unclear.

Philip Seib, a professor of Journalism, Public Communications, and International Relations at the University of Southern California, has his doubts. “Everybody in the world, just about now, is broadcasting in Arabic,” he told me, “but not every Arab is listening to them. Even the BBC these days is having trouble getting an audience in the Arab world, and they’ve got an established reputation. What I know from spending time in the Arab world is that a lot of these foreign broadcasters have spent a lot of money to reach just a handful of people.”

It is difficult to gauge how much money foreign powers are spending or determine their ratings in the region. Audience research in the Arab world is still at a junior stage, uneven in coverage and sometimes unreliable. But one useful indicator, at least as far as younger listeners is concerned, is the number of Twitter followers a given radio network has. Relative to indigenous Arab broadcasts, the numbers tend to be quite low. Out of curiosity, I checked KBS Arabic’s Twitter account and compared it with that of America’s Radio Sawa — and discovered that the little network is punching high above its weight: Whereas 24-hour-a-day Sawa, with an annual budget in excess of $22 million, has won 60,000 Twitter followers, Korea’s Arabic service, with only three full-time employees and one hour of programming daily, has managed to exceed 10,000.

Thus the network may be judged a success within the spectrum of foreign Arabic broadcasts — and the question becomes, what’s Korea’s secret?

To learn more, I called KBS headquarters in the Korean capital Seoul and spoke with Bae Jung-Ok, director of the Arabic section, who goes by the name Lu’Lu’a when on the air. She greeted me warmly. “Whenever I host a program or an interview, I always wonder whether anybody out there hears the reflections of my heart,” she said. “And ma sha Allah, you are in Washington and you heard me. Wow. It’s a dream come true.”

I asked her how she views the nature of her work.

“They call us civil ambassadors,” she explained. “We try as much as we can to be bridges between the two cultures. That’s how we feel about what we do, and our Arab guests see us that way too. There’s a lot in common between Arab and Korean cultures. For example, young people respect the elderly. Many of the same oriental values are present in both cultures. I think this makes it a lot easier to narrow the distance between us. “

KBS Arabic is no spring chicken, Bae Jung-Ok explained. It has been on the air since September 1975, not long after the October 1973 Arab oil embargo which was launched in response to American support for Israel during the Yom Kippur war. The embargo caused a spike in oil prices and a global recession — and drove home the message that foreign powers ignore Arab feelings at their peril.

“In the early ’70s,” she said, “there was the energy crisis, and there were no Arab affairs specialists in Korea. So the government focused on developing Arabic language expertise. Over time we realized that we needed as well to foster cultural, academic, and social cooperation — and one can’t get close to other countries for economic motivations alone.”

Thirty-eight years later, the network still operates on a shoestring budget, with 20 part-time freelancers helping out the full-time staff of three — but feels that its audience has grown vastly larger. Having barely any internal bureaucracy to navigate appears to be a sort of a blessing for the KBS Arabic staff, in that the group keeps nimble and directly engaged with listeners, and enjoys the freedom to tweak the programming based on what appears to be working. Bae Jung-Ok believes that her success in growing the audience has been due largely to the intensely personal relationship she fosters with listeners.

“Ordinary listeners from, say, Algeria, would send us a ‘listeners’ report,'” she explained. “That is, they would tell us how they came to hear us, and give feedback positive and negative. Eventually in time, they also started talking about personal matters. For example, ‘Today’s my birthday,’ or, ‘My daughter got married,’ or, ‘My wife had a baby” — and we would begin to respond to them on the show. One day a listener let us know in advance that on such-and-such day he was going to get married. At that time I was hosting a music segment. And so of course I congratulated him during the show and dedicated a song to the happy couple. He was very happy, and he recorded it and played it at the wedding. Such exchanges of emotions can be very powerful.”

The KBS approach may work out fine for a relatively small country, new to North Africa and the Middle East, which is trying to make a good first impression on Arabs. But its recipe for success may be barely relevant to a superpower like the United States which is well known, ubiquitous, not entirely well liked, and struggling to defend sweeping policies and vast interests. Nor for that matter is KBS Arabic even trying to become a source of news and information about the world beyond the Korean peninsula. Nonetheless, there is at least one glaring lesson which the world’s great powers can draw from KBS — and that is the benefits of having Arabs share the microphone with those native citizens of the country whose impeccable Arabic speaks to their devotion to understanding and relating to Arab societies. At this time are no American-born broadcasters on the US-backed Radio Sawa or, for that matter, Britons on the BBC Arabic. (By contrast, the Chinese broadcast in Arabic does include Chinese broadcasters who narrate programs on a superior level of fluency and diction.)

“When the Arabic section of KBS got started,” Bae Jung-Ok recalled, “we had only Korean graduates in Arabic studies from the university to use as broadcasters. Over time their Arabic got better and better. But in the 21st century, Arabs have started gushing into Korea. Many of them live here now, and we have begun to mix the two voices on our programming — Arabs and Koreans together. And I think the audience response has been better as a result. They always tell us, ‘You’re different than the other foreign networks. Usually they just use Arab broadcasters, whereas you have your own citizens working side by side with Arabs.’ Maybe this is our advantage.”

South Korea — unlike China, Russia, or Iran — is an ally of the United States. But, does it follow that the growing relationship between Korea and the Arab world is an asset to the United States and its interests? And what are the implications of Korean-Arab ties for Americans and their allies — whether with respect to the Middle East or regarding America’s widely touted “pivot to Asia”?

Jon Alterman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies views the relationship as a mixed bag. “On the one hand, strategically we do see eye to eye with South Korea,” he said. “But commercially they’re competing against American companies in many cases. I would expect that this is going to be a relationship which is partly satisfactory and partly unsatisfactory.” Looking ahead, he added, “It may be that we don’t import Middle Eastern oil directly in the coming years, but we import Middle Eastern oil indirectly, when we buy products that are manufactured in Asia and then sent to the United States. Since those products are manufactured on Middle Eastern energy, we become tied to the whole development of Asian-Middle Eastern relations. And our economy becomes tied — no longer mediated through the sort of Levant-centered, … traditional Middle East policy, but through a more mercantile, free-flow-of-trade, protecting-the-sea-lanes orientation. What that means I think is that we have to think more about who’s paying to protect the sea lanes. And does it make sense for the United States to provide all this security for free when other consumers — huge consumers — of energy are freeloading on American efforts?”

It is clear in any case that under the shade of America’s security umbrella in the Middle East, Koreans have been making strong inroads. Are there ways in which the United States, as a partner of Korea, might seek to benefit from those inroads, whether on the ground or over the airwaves? To quote an old Korean proverb I just learned in Arabic translation, “A great river does not refuse small streams.”

To hear the radio sounds and interview voices from which this article was drawn, listen to Joseph Braude’s English-language podcast documentary, “Koreans on Arab airwaves,” at this link. To listen to the complete interview in Arabic with Bae Jung-Ok, director of the Korean Broadcasting System’s Arabic section, click here.

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